Epson 3170 on Linux, using Vuescan

  • Thread starter Thread starter William Sherman
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William Sherman

I've been using Vuescan with my Epson 3170 running Linux, and it
works great. With one caveat of course (or I wouldn't be starting
a new thread).

The problem is that I need to connect the scanner to a system running
Windows with the Epson software installed before Vuescan will work.
I have all the Linux settings in a working state, and when I plug
the scanner into my Linux box, it is acknowledged as being on the
USB bus, and Vuescan works like a charm. But if I turn the scanner
off and then on, Vuescan hangs at the splash screen for a while, and
then fails to work. If I then plug the scanner into my WinXP laptop,
the scanner makes some sounds, flashes the little green light, and
when the light goes solid (after about 7 seconds), I can change it
to my Linux box, and Vuescan works great again.

So, obviously the Epson software on my laptop is doing some
initialization of the scanner, and I wonder whether anyone knows
what that is, and whether there is an existing means to duplicate
that under Linux? Or even if there is a way to pipe the USB
communication through a Linux box and analyze the data.

I've tried this with two versions of Vuescan on two versions
of Linux. I have Vuescan version 7.6.82 running on a RedHat 8.0
installation upgraded to a 2.4.22 kernel, and I have Vuescan
version 8.0.1 running on a RedHat 9.0 installation upgraded
to a 2.4.26 kernel. Both have the same behavior -- they work
great as long as the scanner was initialized on a Windos box.

FYI, I have the iscan program downloaded from the Epson website,
and that provided me with the libesint32.so shared object file,
but the compilation of "iscan" itself bombs on the final linking
phase complaining about some Focus::Focus class or something.

I'm not sure whether it was necessary, but I did the libusb stuff
for my RH90/Vuescan8.0.1 tests. It still seems I need to load
the "scanner" module though, which I didn't think was supposed
to be necessary. In my RH80/Vuescan7.6.82 tests I basically just
need the "scanner" module.

I did lots of web and newsgroup searchs with Google, but haven't
seen anyone else discuss these symptoms, but hopefully someone
has seen it before.

Thanks,
Bill

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/* Bill Sherman ([email protected]) */
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William Sherman said:
I've been using Vuescan with my Epson 3170 running Linux, and it
works great. With one caveat of course (or I wouldn't be starting
a new thread).

The problem is that I need to connect the scanner to a system running
Windows with the Epson software installed before Vuescan will work.

I've added some info to the Release Notes of VueScan 8.0.5:

"You also need to set up the environment variable SANEI_EPKOWA_FIRMWAREFILE
to point to the firmware file esfw32.bin."

The problem you were seeing is that the scanner firmware wasn't
being loaded because this environment variable probably didn't
exist.

Regards,
Ed Hamrick
 
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